About Me

Hints and tips I've learned as I planned my last few trips to Europe.
I am not wealthy but budget-minded travelers can also achieve their dream vacations and I believe that if someone really wants to travel but doesn't know where to start, maybe my blog can help.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Obviously, as many as I can snap without getting tired of the subject. So...yes. I took many, many pictures of Stonehenge. Too many. From many different angles at many different zoom settings. Did I get tired of taking pictures of Stonehenge? Yes. But with all the tourists around snapping pic after pic, I felt decidedly alone if I just walked along the path surrounding this monolith just listening to the recorded information...so I snapped. Literally. I think it had to do with the fact that you can't get any near the formation itself. I heard that they used to let people walk around but of course, idiots that we are, people started hacking away at the stones or writing stupid love notes and hearts on them so now we see it from afar. It was somewhat awesome as we drove up to it...to see it in the distance and know that to date, no one has ever figured out why it was created. Wouldn't it be funny if we found out that it had no meaning to it whatsoever? Just a piece of very, very primitive art.

After Stonehenge, we traveled to Avebury. There were very few people there even though it was free to see and you could walk all over the grounds. In all honesty, this was much larger than Stonehenge and you're allowed to walk right up to the stones to get a feel for how large they really are...the disappointing part is that lots of the stones are missing or fell or were used for stone to build nearby buildings and they were replaced with markers signifying where the large stones were supposed to be. The problem with this site (and I believe this is why Stonehenge is much, much more popular) is that the Avebury Henge is about a mile in circumference. It's huge! That is the size of the outer circle and the inner circle is smaller but still pretty large overall. So the rub is that you can't fit it all into one picture. It's not photogenic at all (see above pic). Humans, simple creatures that we are, want to have everything fit into a nice, neat little package and Avebury just doesn't do it for us.